Yes, that seemed like an awful lot to me too. The initial values are taken directly from the database which sequentially numbers each essay and comment. The larger amount of essays includes everything that the post button was pushed on including static, draft, and deleted pieces as well as all those that were not featured on the Front Page. The featured essays come from direct measure of the number of Main Archive Pages (now 673 @ 30 per page +19 from the inception of the site on August 17, 2007) starting at our very first essay on our official launch day, September 12, 2007 (page 667 currently).

So 11 features a day seems reasonable since we’re currently running around 8 or 9, but 188 comments? Well, if you average them out per feature you end up with about 17 comments which is not orders of magnitude outrageous when you consider that many of the 30% that didn’t make the Front Page got comments too, some quite a few.

Even if the numbers are a little inflated though, it’s still quite a record of accomplishment and I want to thank you, our readers and contributors, for making it such a success.

There are 2 individuals I’m going to publicly embarrass- Robyn and mishima. They’ve been part of the site since before the beginning and the consistent high quality of their work as well as its dependability is an example for anyone, including myself.

For your amusement I thought you might like to see our opening day line up-

Doing the research for one of these retrospectives exposes you to some pretty interesting content, parts of which you are expected to be familiar with even if you weren’t around for the entertainment. Here’s some meta from pre-launch.

We talked a lot about regulating controversy. Oddly the central concept, having Editors debate questionable actions in private and recommend temporary penalties for misbehavior to buhdy who would make the final decision instead of automatic banishment based on witch-hunting mobs, didn’t generate nearly as much as the questions of whether it should be possible to express disapproval of a statement without further explanation (Wrong!) and if Pony was simply too cutesy to live.

When we found out there was no way for Members to examine hidden comments and uprate them if they disagreed with the assessment, we suspended ratings for all but Admins and Editors until Soapblox could fix the problem (a big surprise to sites that had been using ratings but not checking them).

I kind of miss the big guy and expect his disputes with Jeralyn over Zimmerman/Martin and Markos over… well everything, to soon lead to his finding something of substance to write about. He wasn’t always wrong you know.

Later I’ll be re-publishing So Today’s The Big Day! which is kind of about the positive energy we felt when we opened our doors and Welcome New Users which describes some of the basic tools and organization. Our handling of HTML has gotten much better with time so we now do have formatting buttons and a literal character (backslash-‘\'). While technically limited to avoid spam, there’s no practical cap on your daily essays if you get in touch with TheMomCat or I. We monitor pretty closely, but we’re not instantly available necessarily. I’ve kind of come to enjoy the slower pace where no one sets a serious time limit for you to provide linked evidence of your unfounded accusations, conspiracy theories, and catalog of calumnies and slanders!

I hope you’re enjoying your experience here as much as we do providing you a forum to have it. I’m looking forward to many more years of stimulating discussion and thought provoking pieces.